Retrospectives NewsLetter đź“°

🧠 The Complexity Map Retro Finding clarity when everything feels tangled

Author

Joanne Perold
January 14, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

Things in this Newsletter 🗞️

🌟 Editor’s Note

Welcome to another Retro Newsletter. If this is your first time here, I highly recommend reading this newsletter first. It will give you the basics.

Happy 2026 - May this year bring challenges and learning, and fun and growth for you and the teams you work with, and for and with whom you facilitate.

I’m kicking off the year with a retrospective focused on complexity because sometimes there is just so much going on in a system that it’s hard to see what’s going on and it can often keep people in a sense of overwhelm. There’s too much going on. Too many threads. Too many half-decisions. Too many worries mixed with real problems.

When complexity is this high, asking a team “What should we improve?” is almost unfair. People respond with fragments, frustration, or surface-level fixes because everything is competing for attention at once.

This month’s retro is about doing something different: creating clarity before choosing action, or even just creating space for everyone to see what is all out there.

đź’ˇContinuous Improvement Ideas

  • Theme Log – Keep a running list of recurring clusters across retros. Patterns over time are gold.

  • One-Focus Sprints – Experiment with choosing a single improvement theme for a whole sprint.

  • Anxiety Parking Lot – Explicitly name worries that aren’t actionable yet. Naming them often reduces their power.

🧠 The Complexity Map

A retrospective for when complexity is high

This retro is adapted from an individual Complexity Map practice I learned from Sonja Blignaught and redesigned for teams. The goal is to see the patterns of complexity you might be dealing with, so that you can get out of the chaos and make decisions about what to tackle and why.

Set the Stage

It’s always important to set the stage effectively, no matter what you are doing for your retrospective. This phase helps to create safety, build your container and get everyone focused and present. For this retro, you are going to visualise the complexity the team lives with and works in.

Depending on your team and its members, this retro might be overwhelming for some. For some, seeing the sheer number of sticky notes can be stressful and overwhelming, especially if they think that all of these need solutions. So when you set the stage, make sure people understand that the goal here is to dump everything on sticky notes so you can let most of it go and make an informed decision about what to shift, not to fix everything.

Gather data: Collective Brain Dump (10 minutes)

For this, you want each team member to share as many things as they can think of. Set a timer. Ask everyone to write one item per sticky note (physical or digital).

Get them to brain dump:

  • Things that felt heavy this sprint or quarter (or previous year )

  • Worries that keep circling

  • Opportunities we keep postponing

  • Decisions that feel stuck

  • “Should we…?” questions

  • Half-formed ideas or irritations

  • Tech debt, we are putting off

No discussion. No organising. No editing. Once everyone has written everything they can think of on sticky notes. Scatter all the notes onto a shared board.

The only rule: get it out of your head and into view.

Generate Insights: Find the Patterns (15–20 minutes)

When the timer ends, step back and look at the whole field together. Get the team to begin clustering notes that seem to belong together.

They can start silently, then begin to narrate what they’re noticing. Make sure there is space for everyone here and that people take turns clustering and talking. Not everyone has to be part of it, but make sure it’s more than 1 persons perspective.

Common clusters often include:

  • Flow, overload, or context switching

  • Dependencies and coordination

  • Decision clarity or ownership

  • Quality or technical debt

  • Communication or trust

  • Time pressure or energy

Once clusters form, give each one a short, neutral name. Avoid solution language, stay with what is.

Generate Insights 2: See the Real Picture (20 minutes)

This is the heart of the retro. So invest time here. Pick a few of the questions and make space for thinking and dialogue. Keep the dialogue flowing, but make sure there is space for everyone.

Invite the team into inquiry, not fixing. Ask:

  • What themes are repeating?

  • Are several notes pointing to one underlying issue?

  • What feels like signal, and what feels like noise?

  • What’s a real current issue vs an anxious future projection?

  • What’s in our influence, and what isn’t?

Often, teams discover they don’t have twenty problems; they have three real ones and a lot of understandable anxiety. That realisation alone creates relief.

Decide what to do Part 1: Choose Your Focus (10–15 minutes)

Now ask the team to look at the clusters and reflect:

  • Which cluster has the most energy right now?

  • Which one has genuine urgency, not just loudness?

  • Which one, if addressed, might unlock others?

Use a simple method (dot voting, fist to five, quiet reflection) and choose one cluster only. Circle it. That’s your focus for now.

The rest are acknowledged, not ignored.

Step 5: Decide What to Do (15–20 minutes)

Only now do you move into action. It’s important to remember that high complexity means high entanglement, and so many of these clusters will be related. So when deciding what to do, think about experiments or nudges.

For the chosen cluster, ask:

  • What’s one small experiment we could try?

  • What’s the smallest step that would create learning?

  • What would “better” look like — not perfect?

Limit yourselves to:

  • 1–2 actions maximum

  • Clear ownership

  • A clear moment to review and learn

This retro isn’t about solving complexity, it’s about moving with clarity and a very important part of that is making sure that will be a future space for reflection on what changed or what didn’t?

Step 6: Close – Restore Spaciousness (5–10 minutes)

Close by helping the team leave lighter than they arrived.

Try:

  • “What feels clearer now?”

  • “What are you leaving on the board?”

  • “One word for how you’re leaving this retro?”

Clarity often doesn’t come from doing more. It comes from giving permission to see what’s actually here.

This Retro creates spaciousness by making complexity visible, shared, and shaped. Tell me what you learned and how it went.

🧠 Quick Facilitator’s Tip

Protect the silence early.

Resist the urge to discuss during the brain dump and clustering. Let the data speak before opinions rush in. It makes the later conversation far richer.

🔥 Things You Might Like

đź’ˇ Did You Know?

1. There are only 13 root DNS servers for the entire Internet. 🌍

Despite billions of devices online, the global Domain Name System starts with just 13 logical root servers (named A–M). They’re mirrored all over the world using anycast, which is why the internet doesn’t fall over daily.

A lovely reminder that massive complexity often rests on surprisingly small foundations.

Till next time and into the new year,

Jo